Too much, not enough

Stand-up superstar, talk show trailblazer, QVC hawker, red carpet harpy, Joan Rivers has had more careers than the Olsen twins and Paris Hilton combined. Yes, we know she's funny. No laugh track needed when she's around. But her real gift is for being a supercharged Hollywood yenta, a woman who would probably vanish in a puff of sequins were she deprived of an audience for her wisecracks about everyone else's dirty laundry.

"Let me tell you a story," she says directly to the audience in "Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress," her cozy if only sporadically entertaining autobiographical show, which opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse. And indeed, Rivers' cup runneth over with anecdotes. An intermission-less play that crawls too close to the two-hour mark for anyone's comfort, the piece mixes tales from her well-publicized professional and personal struggles with shtick from her Heidi Abromowitz act.

There's humor and there's bile (including quite a bit of score settling). When she's not riffing on her face lifts, she's ripping Johnny Carson for supposedly blackballing her from late-night TV. There's also plenty of warmth -- and a fair amount of wisdom too -- from a showbiz survivor who's grateful that the final curtain hasn't yet cut off her just- getting-good monologue.

Rivers is like a Beckett character ad-libbing for her very life. She lives to perform, performs to live, as though blood and oxygen were fed to her from the spotlight.

No, it's not a solo piece. Two other actors share the stage with her pretty much the whole time, another one comes on near the end, and three others (including daughter Melissa) appear on camera in a spoof of an awards pre-show. But the focus is never in doubt. In fact, if Rivers were writing this review, mention of the bit players might be left for the fine print.

The setup -- pretext would be more accurate -- is that she's backstage in her dressing room on Hollywood's biggest night, gearing up to ask the frivolous and famous who they're wearing. Nothing is going right. Her usual team is missing in action, and she's saddled instead with a Russian stylist named Svetlana (Emily Kosloski), a would-be Muscovite Madonna, and Kenny (Adam Kulbersh), a nervous-Nellie assistant, who acts like he'd rather be impersonating his boss in a West Hollywood saloon.